Via Edward Blum, visiting scholar at AEI and president of Students for Fair Admissions.
The Justice Department confirmed last week that it is examining claims of racial discrimination against Asian-Americans in university admissions. It is possible that this will result in investigations and lawsuits targeting our nation’s most competitive schools — or both.
This is a significant and welcome development. If the Justice Department follows through — as it should — what its lawyers will find at Harvard and other Ivy League schools is an unfair and unconstitutional process that restricts the number of Asians admitted. That should alarm all Americans.
Sadly, Harvard has a long and ugly history of using “holistic” admissions to discriminate against high-achieving minorities. As many historians have detailed, nearly 100 years ago, Harvard’s leadership believed it had too many Jews because almost a quarter of all Harvard freshmen were Jewish.
In 1920, in a letter to a colleague, Harvard President Abbott Lawrence Lowell warned that the increasing number of Jewish students enrolling at Harvard would ultimately “ruin the college.”
To solve their “Jewish invasion,” Harvard invented the “holistic” admissions system, which diminished an applicant’s academic achievements in favor of subjective factors like “leadership” and “sociability.” Within a year, holistic admissions decimated Jewish enrollment.
Today, Harvard’s discriminatory policies target Asian-Americans — call it the Asian problem. To end this discrimination, Students for Fair Admissions, a nonprofit group which I lead as president, sued Harvard in federal court.
Read further over at AEI.